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I’ve never used a Kemper, but they seem to have a good reputation for reproducing amp tones. Kemper and Helix are very different technologies. Kemper does an outside in simulation of an exiting amp, while Helix does an inside out implementation of an amp using digital components. Both of these approaches have pros and cons, and likely will produce different results even when modeling the same amp. That said, two amps of exactly the same model often sound different, so this could be part of it too. There are also differences in how the digital components are implemented, and limitations resulting from DSP architecture. S-Gear for example also uses digital models of electrical components to build amplifiers, and its amp models do sound very good compared to anything. But I think the decision on what rig is best for you needs to be based on more criteria then just subtle changes in amp tone that perhaps few people can hear, especially in a mix. If you’re a professional guitar player and are fortunate enough to have a signature tone, then Kemper is probably the best way to take that on the road. If you’re a weekend gigging musician and need a simple, reliable, flexible end-to-end solution, I think you’d be hard pressed to find something better than a good JTV and Helix.

Helix Native has input and output meters. So its pretty easy to use them to gain stage individual blocks and patch levels. Doing it by ear in Helix floor is probably good enough in most situations. Line6 has done a good job keeping Helix gain staging simple, and removed a lot of complexity in patch setup and UI. The guitar input has enough dynamic range that there’s no need for an input gain control, and its rare to need to use the input pad switch on except for unusually high output guitars. Then if you balance each block in the signal chain so that the bypass and effect on levels are pretty similar, you should have no significant gain staging problems and little risk of digital clipping. Give yourself plenty of headroom in the PA input channel strip (shoot for between -18 and -12dB with peaking a -6 at most) and there should be no problems. There’s perhaps not much need to make it more complicated then this. Where gain staging can get more complex is in how you gain stage multiple distortion pedals into the front of a driven amp. This can become a muddy/fizzy mess if there’s too much distortion feeding into distortion, even if you’re a long way from digital clipping. Maybe I’ll focus on this in my next blog post.

Re: stereo vs. mono: there’s a compromise. You can run mono effects in front of the amp, and then use stereo effects after the amp, typically for chorus, delay and reverb. Depending on the effect, most of them can be configured to be “mono compatible”. That is, if you isolate only one side, or the other, or sum them both to mono, the overall tone doesn’t change that much. So if you avoid ping-pong effects, or things that put significantly different things in different stereo channels, you can get some benefit from the stereo effects while avoiding audience presentation and positioning issues. Whether its worth it or not is another question. I run stereo all the time (into the same PA speakers), but never rely on it for any specific tone. It just adds a bit of depth. I also use two JBL EON610s for my backline, and they’re stereo too. These provide some front of the band fill, and give me and my guitar something to feel. I also use IEMs mostly to protect my ears. Re: setup: those subs can make a big difference. Generally you’ll want to have a low cut between 80 and 150 Hz on guitar. If you do that, the subs won’t change the tone much. But if you don’t and you set the tone stack for a nice bass thud, it could get pretty muddy when you add the subs.

The BlueSky is certainly richer in these videos with more high end. That might sound better with solo guitar, but it might not fit as well in some mixes. Helix reverbs in general seem pretty dark. Not sure why, but I don’t think that’s any limitation of the hardware. Might be the preference of the modeler?

Note some pedals might have a bit of jitter in them that could possibly cause auto activate.

Because it s lot easier to get rid of unwanted high end then it is to get it back when its alaready gone. I like having the option.

My mother always told me “If you don’t have anything positive to say, don’t say anything.” Good advice, but not always. We sometimes need to feel a right to assert our own boundaries. @cruisinon2, you are a valued contributor, I never miss your posts. I found your response to be constructive. There can be quality and connection issues with Variax. I think properly serviced and setup, these instruments are pretty reliable. I have four Variax guitars. The Variax 300 was the most unreliable because of an intermittent short between the shield and one of connector pins. Tape fixed that. I’ve had one piezo pickup go bad on my Variax 700 Acoustic. I use a JTV-69S for every gig and don’t even think about its reliability. Its never been a problem other than not seating the VDI cable completely. My Variax Standard neck is pretty environment sensitive. So I don’t gig with it anymore. Avoid thin necks. The feel great, but tend to be less stable.

Best thing to do is to establish a reference and then compare the pedals against the reference. A good reference might be you tube amp’s drive/lead channel. If you like that tone, see what you need to do with the pedals to reproduce and expand it. Pedals can provide a lot of flexibility compared to using an amp’s drive/lead channel. You usually have a lot more control over the distortion voicing - often with bass cut before distortion and treble cut after. Experiment. Its often possible to get similar sounds from different pedals by changing the clean amp settings.

To me the biggest difference can be summed up in one word: Variax. I’m old school. I Still have a Les Paul, Strat Deluxe and Fender Showman amp. But a JTV-69S with Daytona SVL pickups and Helix is by far my preferred gigging rig. Open tunings and acoustic tones are a must. Variax delivers. Helix provides the Variax integration I need for gigging.

Things I’m missing in HX effects (that probably could be implemented) Access to guitar input block with impedance and noise gate (like in Helix) Access to output block to change output gain level (to avoid having to do it in a block) in order to control how the amp is pushed HX Effects is 1/2 Helix (one DSP instead of two), so why not 16 blocks on the path instead of just nine. Certainly it can’t be just a UI restriction (three buttons, three blocks visible in the signal path view) Ability to go to snapshot mode without having to switch to preset mode and press preset up/down at the same time. Stomps and snapshots should be really easy to access in a patch. Don’t waste a footswitch for looper - you have to use the mode switch to get out of looper mode, why not use the same switch to get into it. I need all the effects controls I can get on the footswitches, especially since there are only 6 (8 if you use the expression pedals to control block bypass). But that said, its breathed new life into my old Showman amp. I plan on gigging with this at least once this year. I need to change how I play a few songs that require open tunings and/or acoustic tones. But that’s ok. I don’t mind playing songs differently.

Zapier interface to Helix app to support integration with Apple Notes or Evernote might be more flexible. I need my notes to be searchable.

I have a Helix that makes all these things a lot easier and can directly drive a FRFR. I use HX Effects in front of my old Fender Showman amp. For that, it is perfect. And what a sound this combination makes.

The strings you want to change need to have their controller set to snapshot. Otherwise the tuning is for the patch as a whole, not individual snapshots. This is an easy thing to forget.

It does, but I haven’t figured out what to use them for yet. Adding a speaker model in an effects unit designed to go into a guitar amp isn’t useful. You could add acoustic body images, but that doesn’t make sense going into a guitar amp either since its not a FRFR. They’re too short for reverb IRs. Anybody found a good use for them? What I’d like to see is IRs that could change a Strat into a Les Paul, or model the delta between different magnetic pickups to make a pickiup sound like other pickups. That could be quite useful in a front of the amp effects pedal. But I don’t know of anyone who makes those.

You can also use the level control of last block in the signal path, often a reverb, or any effect that’s always on, to adjust the volume of the overall patch. This will ensure that you’re not raising the volume somewhere in the signal path that might impact tone or cause digital distortion.

Its great to see professional, seasoned musicians using Helix. But that's not a big metric for me. Gigging in a local club band 2 to 3 times a month with JTV-69S and Helix is just so flexible, and sounds so great. I'm happy enough with that.

I'm getting a HX Effects tomorrow that I'm going to put in front of my 50 year old Fender Showman amp. And I'll be playing my 51 year old Les Paul, mostly in the garage with my son on drums. I bought both of these freshman and sophomore year in collage and still use them. The Les Paul was the first thing I ever bought on credit. $364 if I remember right. Bought in Portland Maine. The Showman I got in 1968 at Viner Music Co. in Bangor Maine (I went to University of Maine in Orono). I sold a Super Reverb to get it - big mistake I've regretted for years. That Showman has been heavily modified though and something I'm happy to still have. I haven't gigged with the Showman or Les Paul for years, but with HX Effects, I'm committed to doing at least one outdoor gig with them this year. JTV69S and Helix are just way too convenient.

Play more music!

I think they're the same.

I rarely stack distortion pedals as this can result in a muddy mess. I prefer to gain stage with at least two distortion pedals set at different drive levels, using the amp drive for the third. Amp drive is the first gain stage, taking the amp from almost clean to almost distorted. What I mean by this is that the drive off isn't quite clean, there's a little bit of hair there. And the drive on isn't quite distorted, its just louder and with a bit more hair. A lot of my tones fit in this range. The drive on setting isn't so distorted that I can't also use it as a lead boost stacked with the distortion pedals. Then I use Teemah! for overdrive. I tried them all, this one really does it right for me. It can almost be left on all the time, and use the guitar volume control to set the drive/distortion level. I tend not to do this mostly because its just easier to preset the drive and/or overdrive footswitches. What I like about Teemah! is the ability to cut lows before distortion and highs after. This does what you need most of the time and is a lot simpler than using EQ blocks around distortion blocks. I use Minotaur for extended distortion tones, keeping the drive up pretty high. I find its slight mid boost helps its distortion cut through the mix without adding a lot of low-end mud or high-end fizz.

Its not just the neck wood that can effect tone, its how it seats in the body pocket. Try this: with the neck bolted on, strings on and up to pitch, slightly loosen the neck bolds until you hear the neck settle into the body pocket. Then tighten the screws back up. This will optimize the connection between the neck and body to give fuller tone and more sustain. I the neck isn't seated the same way every time, the guitar is likely to sound different. This technique might also help get more consistent tone.

No, I'm saying the looper wasn't necessarily intended to be a performance level looper because of the need to mode switch to share the foot switches between looper, effect and snapshot control. So perhaps having long loops, which would likely require more tone switching, might not have been a priority. But I too wish the loop was longer as it would make practicing easier. But I'd probably never use it for live looping in any case.

We needed horns and a clavinet on Superstition, so I decided to see if I could come up with a reasonable MIDI guitar setup that I could use live. This way I can play the horn parts and they keyboard player can handle the clavinet. I've been tempted to do this for a while, but haven't had enough need to motivate the work to set it up, and I thought it might be too complicated for practical live use. I have a Fishman Triple Play on my Variax Standard, but I don't generally use that guitar on gigs, and don't want to have to deal with keeping it charged and connected. So I use JamOrigin MIDI Guitar 2 instead. This is an amazing piece of software that can convert analog guitar to MIDI right off your pickups - no hardware required, use it on any guitar. There's a little latency, but not bad, and the tracking is actually quite good, even for full, complex chords. So that simplifies things. Our band uses an X32-Core, so we already have an older 2011 MacBook Pro 13" that we use to run the PA, so the computer's already there. I already own Logic and MainStage, so that gives me all the instruments I needed. The only change from my typical live rig (JTV-69S, Helix, 2xEON610s for 1/4 out, and XLR direct to two channels in the PA) is the addition of a USB cable from Helix to the computer and starting up MainStage along with X32 Edit. This is a couple more things to deal with in setup and teardown, but not difficult at all. The Helix patch is my normal guitar patch with two simple changes. First I add an Instant command to Command Center to send a PC message to MainStage to select the desired song patch. I turn off global PC send so that the patches in Helix don't have to line up with the patches in MainStage, each can have its own specific PC message. The other thing is I use FootSwitch 1 to toggle between guitar and MIDI. I do this by having the foot switch control the MainStage master volume and the Helix Amp channel volume. But setting the min/max and max/min values for each one, I can configure a blend of MIDI instrument and/or guitar as needed. One thing that you'll probably want to do is edit the MIDI settings at the Concert level to send all unmapped MIDI messages to all software tracks, this will ensure the pitch bends created by MIDI Guitar 2 will be sent to the instrument tracks. Then each track can filter these out if they're not appropriate for the instrument. This makes using MIDI guitar at a gig really no different than just using Helix. I select a patch on Helix, and then use a foot switch to turn the MIDI instrument on/off just like any other effect. Different patches can have different instruments blended with the guitar if needed. That's pretty flexible and functional for just adding one app on the computer and a USB cable. I haven't tried it at a gig yet, but I'm thinking this might be pretty useful.

Not sure Helix looper feature is lollipoped, it may have been designed intentionally to be short. The reason is its very difficult to use a looper and switch effects/snapshots using the same set of footswitches and the Mode/Looper switch. Any real looping would benefit from a separate dedicated looper in the Helix effects loop.

I have not found a way to control the model on/off using snapshots. It works with patches - Variax returns to the state it was in when the patch was saved. But there done't seem to be a snapshot visible parameter for turning the model on/off, or change the mag/model balance. Wish the model parameter had a None option that switched the model switch off.